Every store that runs Google Analytics, sends marketing email, or shows a remarketing ad is legally required to have a privacy policy and, in most of the world, a working cookie consent banner. That is not a nice-to-have, and the enforcement landscape got noticeably sharper in 2026. Termly is one of the few tools that handles both the legal documents and the consent management in one subscription, starting free. This review from Ecommerce Paradise covers what each plan actually includes, where the free tier stops being enough, and whether it’s the right fit for a high-ticket dropshipping store.
The short version: Termly is the best-value all-in-one compliance tool for a single store, the free plan is genuinely usable to get a banner live today, and Pro+ at $20 a month is the tier that actually keeps you compliant as regulations move.
Get a Compliant Cookie Banner Live in Under an Hour
Free plan includes a cookie policy, consent banner, script auto-blocker, and quarterly scans. Over 2 million businesses use Termly across 150+ countries.
What Termly Actually Is
Termly is a compliance platform with two halves. The first generates legal documents: privacy policy, terms and conditions, cookie policy, disclaimer, refund and return policy, shipping policy, EULA, acceptable use policy, impressum, and accessibility statement. The second is a consent management platform, meaning the cookie banner, the preference center, the script auto-blocker, and the consent logs.
Founded in 2017 and acquired by group.one in January 2024, it now sits alongside WP Rocket, Imagify, Rank Math, and one.com in the same portfolio. That matters more than corporate trivia usually does, because compliance tooling is infrastructure and you want the company behind it to still exist in three years.
The scale numbers are large: over 2 million businesses, 150 countries, roughly 1,800 policies generated per day, and about 1.7 billion banner views a month.
Termly Plans and Pricing
| Plan | Price | Legal Policies | Banner Views | Cookie Scans |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Termly Free | $0 | 1 basic policy | 10,000/month | Quarterly |
| Termly Starter | $14/site/month annually | 2 policies, 10 edits | 50,000/month | Monthly |
| Termly Pro+ | $20/site/month annually | Unlimited, unlimited edits | Unlimited | Weekly |
| Termly Agency | Custom, from 10 sites | Unlimited | Unlimited | Weekly |
Annual billing saves 25 percent against monthly, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee, and bulk licensing discounts start at five licenses. Every plan covers one website, with additional sites bought as extra licenses.
The Free Plan Is Genuinely Useful
Most compliance tools offer a free tier that is functionally a demo. Termly’s is not. You get one basic legal policy, a cookie policy, a working consent banner, the script auto-blocker, quarterly cookie scans, cross-domain consent, an embeddable DSAR form, and 10,000 banner views a month.
For a store that just launched and is doing a few thousand sessions, that is enough to be genuinely compliant on the cookie side while you focus on selling. Ten thousand banner views goes further than people expect, since it counts banner impressions rather than total pageviews.
What you don’t get free is policy editing, regulation monitoring, hosted policies that update themselves, or the ability to remove Termly branding.
Where Starter Stops Making Sense
Starter at $14 a month adds a second legal policy, ten policy edits, 50,000 banner views, monthly scans, and regulation monitoring. It’s the awkward middle tier, and I’d generally skip it.
Here’s why. A real ecommerce store needs more than two policies. You need a privacy policy, terms and conditions, a cookie policy, a refund and return policy, and if you run affiliate links, a disclaimer. That’s five, and Starter caps you at two.
The $6 monthly gap between Starter and Pro+ buys unlimited policies, unlimited edits, unlimited banner views, weekly scans, and auto-updating hosted policies. That is not a close call.
Stop Rewriting Policies Every Time a Law Changes
Pro+ gives you unlimited auto-updating policies, weekly cookie scans, Google Consent Mode v2 Advanced, and IAB TCF 2.3 for $20/month.
Pro+ Is the Tier That Actually Works
At $20 a month billed annually you get unlimited policies and edits, unlimited banner views, weekly cookie scans, auto-updated hosted policies, subdomain scanning, consent logs you can export, regional consent rules, multi-language support, custom banner styles, unlimited users, and Termly branding removed.
Two features on that list matter more than the rest. Auto-updated hosted policies mean your privacy policy changes when the law changes without you touching anything, which is the entire reason to pay for this category rather than generating a document once and forgetting it. And consent logs are what you produce if a regulator ever asks you to demonstrate you actually collected consent.
Google Consent Mode v2 Is the Part That Affects Your Ads
This is the detail most store owners miss. Google Consent Mode v2 governs whether your conversion data and remarketing audiences keep working for EEA and UK visitors. Get it wrong and your Google Ads reporting quietly degrades while you keep spending.
Termly is a Google-certified CMP partner. The free and Starter plans support Basic consent mode; Pro+ supports Advanced. Advanced is what preserves modeled conversions when a user declines, which is the difference between losing that data entirely and getting a modeled estimate.
If you’re running paid traffic to a store with any European visitors, that alone justifies Pro+ over the cheaper tiers.
What the Script Auto-Blocker Actually Does
Under GDPR you’re supposed to block non-essential tracking scripts until the visitor consents, not fire them and ask afterward. Almost nobody implements this correctly by hand.
Termly’s auto-blocker scans your site, categorizes the cookies and trackers it finds, and blocks them until consent is given, on every plan including free. That’s the single most technically difficult part of cookie compliance and it’s handled for you.
The caveat is that automatic categorization is not perfect. Review what the scanner found and reclassify anything it got wrong, particularly custom scripts and less common third-party tools.
Test it properly after install. Open your store in a private window from a European IP if you can, decline everything, and check your browser’s network tab to confirm the trackers you declined are genuinely not firing. A banner that appears but blocks nothing is the most common failure mode in this whole category, and it looks compliant right up until someone actually checks.
Coverage Across 28 Privacy Laws
Termly’s documents cover roughly 28 data privacy laws, including EU GDPR, UK GDPR, Canada’s PIPEDA, California’s CCPA and CalOPPA, and sixteen other US state-level privacy laws.
That US state coverage is the part that’s been changing fastest. A store selling nationwide is now subject to a patchwork of state laws that did not exist a few years ago, and tracking that yourself is not a reasonable use of your time.
Setup on Shopify and WordPress
On WordPress there’s an official plugin, which makes installation genuinely two minutes. On Shopify you paste a script into your theme, which takes slightly longer but is still well within what a non-technical owner can do.
Policies deploy either as a hosted link you drop into your footer or as embedded HTML on your own page. Hosted is better on Pro+ because it updates automatically; embedded HTML is fine on free where nothing auto-updates anyway.
Where It Falls Short
Termly is explicitly not a law firm and says so plainly. For a standard store selling physical products, its documents are appropriate. For anything unusual, regulated, or high-liability, you want an actual attorney, and no generator changes that.
Pricing is per website, which gets expensive fast if you run several stores. At three sites on Pro+ you’re at $60 a month, and that’s when the Agency tier or a competitor with multi-site pricing starts looking better.
The interface is functional rather than pleasant, and the questionnaire that generates policies is longer than it feels like it needs to be.
What Independent Sources Report
Capterra’s verified Termly reviews aggregate real subscriber feedback, which is the fastest way to see what people report about daily use rather than what the marketing pages claim.
G2’s Termly listing covers the consent management side specifically, where implementation experience and support quality tend to surface in the reviews.
The group.one acquisition announcement documents the ownership change and the company’s scale, which matters if you care about whether your compliance vendor is stable.
How It Fits a High-Ticket Store
A high-ticket store has a specific compliance profile. Traffic volumes are usually modest, which means banner view caps are rarely the binding constraint. But you almost certainly run remarketing, you probably collect leads before the sale, and your average order value makes you a more attractive target for opportunistic legal complaints.
That combination points to Pro+ rather than free. The consent logs and Advanced Consent Mode matter, and $240 a year is trivially small against a single $3,000 order.
Get the business entity formed first, though. Policies that name a business that doesn’t legally exist are a strange artifact, and Bizee handles LLC formation inexpensively.
Which Policies Your Store Actually Needs
Five documents cover almost every store selling physical products. A privacy policy, which is legally required the moment you run analytics or collect an email. Terms and conditions, which your payment processor and ad platforms expect even where law doesn’t demand them. A cookie policy, which pairs with the banner. A refund and return policy, required in some jurisdictions and by processors in practice. And a disclaimer if you use affiliate links, which the FTC requires.
Termly generates all five, plus shipping policy, EULA, acceptable use, impressum for German-market sales, and an accessibility statement. The accessibility one is worth noting because accessibility complaints against ecommerce sites have become a genuine cost center and a published statement is a cheap first step.
Which of these you need depends partly on what you sell. A store in a regulated high-ticket niche like medical equipment or anything with installation requirements carries more disclosure obligations than one selling furniture, and that’s worth checking before you assume the standard five are sufficient.
Supplier Agreements Are a Separate Problem
One thing worth being clear about: Termly generates customer-facing policies, not the contracts between you and your suppliers. Dealer agreements, MAP policies, and dropship terms all come from the supplier side and are negotiated rather than generated.
That’s a different discipline entirely, and the diligence involved in vetting and signing a supplier has nothing to do with a policy generator. Don’t assume a compliance subscription covers the contract side of your business, because it doesn’t and was never meant to.
Pros and Cons
Pros: A free tier that genuinely works for a new store, both legal documents and consent management in one subscription, Google-certified CMP with Consent Mode v2 and IAB TCF 2.3 support, script auto-blocking on every plan, coverage across 28 privacy laws including sixteen US state laws, auto-updating hosted policies on Pro+, exportable consent logs, an official WordPress plugin, 25 percent annual discount, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Cons: Per-website pricing gets expensive across multiple stores, the Starter tier is poor value and should mostly be skipped, Advanced Consent Mode is gated behind Pro+, automatic cookie categorization needs manual review, the interface is dated, the policy questionnaire is long, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer when your situation is genuinely complex.
What Happens to Your Banner If You Cancel
This is worth understanding before you subscribe. Hosted policies are served from Termly’s servers, which means they stop rendering if your subscription lapses. The consent banner stops too. Cancel without a replacement in place and your store is suddenly running trackers with no consent mechanism, which is worse than where you started.
The mitigation is straightforward. If you plan to leave, export your policies as static HTML first and have the replacement banner configured before you cancel, not after. Downgrading to the free tier rather than cancelling outright also keeps a basic banner running while you sort out the transition, which is the safer path if you’re just cutting cost rather than switching vendors.
The Ongoing Compliance Problem Nobody Budgets For
Generating a privacy policy once is easy. Keeping it accurate as you add tools is the part that fails. Every time you install a new app, add a pixel, or switch email platforms, your actual data practices change and your policy does not.
Weekly scanning on Pro+ catches the tracker side of that automatically. It cannot catch everything, so a quarterly ten-minute review of what tools you’re actually running is still worth doing, and it pairs well with keeping your bookkeeping current since both are the kind of admin that quietly rots.
The Verdict
Termly earns an 8.6 out of 10. It solves the two hardest parts of ecommerce compliance in one place, the free tier is unusually honest, Pro+ at $20 a month is well-priced for what it does, the Google CMP certification means your ad data keeps working, and the group.one ownership suggests it will still be here in three years. It loses points for per-site pricing that punishes multi-store operators, a Starter tier that shouldn’t really exist, and gating Advanced Consent Mode behind the top consumer plan.
Ready to Stop Worrying About Compliance?
Start free, upgrade to Pro+ for $20/month when you need unlimited policies, with 25% off annual billing and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Termly cost?
Free for one basic policy and 10,000 banner views. Starter is $14 per site monthly billed annually, Pro+ is $20, and Agency is custom pricing from ten sites. Annual billing saves 25 percent.
Is the free plan enough for a real store?
For cookie compliance on a new store, yes. It includes the banner, cookie policy, script auto-blocker, and quarterly scans. It caps you at one basic legal policy, which most stores outgrow quickly.
Does Termly work with Shopify?
Yes, via a script you paste into your theme. There’s also an official WordPress plugin if you run your store or blog on WordPress.
Does it handle Google Consent Mode v2?
Yes, and Termly is a Google-certified CMP partner. Free and Starter support Basic mode; Pro+ supports Advanced, which preserves modeled conversion data.
Is Termly a replacement for a lawyer?
No, and the company says so directly. It covers standard compliance for a typical online store. Complex, regulated, or high-liability situations still need an actual attorney.
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Pricing, plan limits, features, and regulatory coverage change periodically. Always verify current details directly on the provider’s website, and consult a qualified attorney about compliance obligations specific to your business and jurisdiction. Ecommerce Paradise uses affiliate links for some providers mentioned in this article, which does not affect the recommendations made here.
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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